Lior Lavy wants to bring the ease of online ordering to the kind of grocery shopping that usually requires a lot of running around.
Lavy co-founded Artizone in 2010 and brought it to Chicago in 2012. In an increasingly competitive online grocery market, it delivers fresh, local food from some 50 specialty vendors in Chicago, offering sustainable fish, homemade sausage, cherry preserves, meats and produce, baked goods, groceries, beer and wine.
“We found we had a desire to do something for small businesses and artisans, products with stories – maybe a good winery, a good restaurant, a handcrafted artifact – and something with a story behind it,” said Lavy, a vice president and co-founder.
“Anything that he or she is doing because he loves doing it is something that we love.”
The website includes a “Meet the Artisans” tab that introduces visitors to sellers and their products. The artisans provide stories about themselves and their food or products. The site also allows users to “shop by aisle.”
Lavy, a Jerusalem native, moved from Israel to Highland Park last fall to help support Artizone. He and four partners led an Israel unit of French software company Dassault Systemes. Israel-based Artizone is the brainchild of that core management team, and the new company maintains a software-development and maintenance contract with Dassault Systemes.
With about $12 million of their own money, the team launched Artizone in Dallas in 2010. The Chicago business has been adding about two vendors a week and now matches Dallas in the average number of daily orders.
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Artizone has seven U.S. employees and about 20 contractual workers including drivers, marketers and customer representatives, Lavy said.
Lavy said the business remains unprofitable but with the help of a marketing push grew 400 percent in the last quarter. He said the company serves an average of 200 Chicago homes per week, with a 50 percent retention rate.
“Right now we’re focusing on turning Dallas and Chicago into profitable markets, and we believe we can achieve this goal this year (or early 2015),” Lavy wrote in a followup email. “We can’t share yet the next city we have in mind, but I can tell you that I already know we’ll have fun starting there.”
He said the company also plans to expand nationwide shipping, currently a limited part of the business.
The biggest hurdle, Lavy said, is trying to convince people to plan meals ahead of time. Orders placed by 10 a.m. can be delivered the same day, with some exceptions.
Lavy said he also has found challenges coordinating with 50 vendors who have varied shop hours. Some close on Mondays while others close on Sundays, for example.
“You are trying to offer a homogeneous experience,” Lavy said. “You have to adapt to preparation time, hours of operation, capabilities of different artisans. We developed technology that allows us to do it, but when you put the technology out there for real people to use, you have to adjust.”
Dirk Fucik, owner of Dirk’s Fish & Gourmet Shop in Lincoln Park, limited Artizone orders to five per day to see how they went but now plans unlimited orders because the system has worked well.
“They are advertising on TV, which is good,” he said, “and they have a large variety of customers on their site, which should bring us new customers in turn.”